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From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Distorting fseek semantics
Message-ID: <6446@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Sun, 20-Sep-87 21:40:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.6446
Posted: Sun Sep 20 21:40:44 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 21-Sep-87 03:45:04 EDT
References: <493@its63b.ed.ac.uk> <6061@brl-smoke.ARPA> <8560@utzoo.UUCP> <1134@bsu-cs.UUCP> <722@sugar.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 16

In article <722@sugar.UUCP> peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>Whitesmiths believed the UNIX programmers manual was copyright by AT&T and
>thus they couldn't copy the functions described in it.

I don't believe this was an issue; after all, Whitesmiths did provide
many UNIX-compatible functions (even their own UNIXy system, Idris).
From discussions with Whitesmiths personnel, I gather that they
thought that their I/O routines were better-designed (more orthogonal,
etc.), so in the absence of standards (remember, their C system was
the first one available outside UNIX) they decided to provide more
useful routines.  The development of UNIX-like stdio as a de facto
standard occurred later, at which time one could get an implementation
of stdio for Whitesmiths C from Plum-Hall.  I believe Whitesmiths are
committed to providing ANSI-compatible facilities in future releases,
which means including the stdio functions.  (I don't know whether or
not they currently include these.)